Ron Paul on the IRS

April 12, 2006 at 02:20 PM | categories: ron paul, liberty rants | View Comments

I'm pretty critical when it comes to the IRS, and I'm sure many people would think my beliefs on the IRS (short answer: abolishment) are too extreme. However, Congressman Ron Paul has recently spoken on this issue and has a very compelling argument that few would be able to refute:

Even today, individual income taxes account for only approximately one-third of federal revenue. Eliminating one-third of the proposed 2007 budget would still leave federal spending at roughly $1.8 trillion – a sum greater than the budget just 6 years ago in 2000! Does anyone seriously believe we could not find ways to cut spending back to 2000 levels?

He is talking about what would happen if we were to completely abolish the IRS today. What would happen? The US would have 1/3 less cash than it would otherwise, but the remaining 2/3 would still be more than the entire 2000 budget. This points out two things to me:

  1. The IRS would be really easy to reform, if not outright abolish. The Government would still have a plethora of avenues to aquire revenue, including constitutional methods: tarrifs and excise taxes. Even if we just abolished the IRS and did nothing else, the government would still have as much incoming revenue as it did in 2000!
  2. If the government would have the same revenue as it did in 2000 by cutting out an entire 1/3 of the budget, what does that say about the government's spending habits?? That means a massive increase in the budget in just the past six years.

What is so important that we're doing now that we weren't doing back in 2000? The war? Not many today will argue that anymore. We can end the war, we can get rid of all the pork spending in Washington if our Congressman are allowed to at least read the bills before they're passed and by so doing we can easily restore this nation to using constitutional methods of taxation. It just takes a bit of (re-)education:

[Education] is favourable to liberty. Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights, and where learning is confined to a few people, liberty can be neither equal nor universal. --Dr. Benjamin Rush (1786)

Update: As soon as I posted this, someone mentioned to me after reading the above mentioned article by Mr. Paul that he never specifically mentions abolishing the IRS. True, it wasn't explicit; It was implicit. Mr. Paul speaks out about this a lot, so it's not very difficult to find where he stands on the issue:

By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don't mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing. Ron Paul (2002)

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